Beyond Retribution

Retributive punishment rarely brings the satisfaction that we imagine it will. And so, more often than not, we conclude that the punishment just wasn’t enough. We envision torments heaped on torments. We imagine an eternal realm in which the most unbearable afflictions stretch out not for days or years or thousands of years, but forever. Anguish without end, Amen.

But the glee that comes from indulging in such imaginings is not something to cling to. It is toxic, cutting us off from the compassion that can bring peace. And yet I don’t blame our drive for revenge as such. The problem, I think, is that we have misunderstood the reason we’re not satisfied when an enemy is punished—even the punishment of death. We think it’s because our enemies haven’t suffered enough—the truth is that it’s because our enemies haven’t been redeemed.

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And so my theory is this: at the root of our desire for retribution is the wish that those who have wronged us feel the full weight of what they have done, suffering remorse proportionate in severity to the gravity of their crime. In short, we hunger for their redemption. And so, when the retributive impulse is finally satisfied, it naturally resolves itself into forgiveness. The darkness is lifted, because the evil—the dissociation from the good that inspired the crime—has been destroyed.

A lethal injection, ending the life of a self-satisfied killer who remains unrepentant to the end, will not produce what our retributive impulses crave. And so we are left dissatisfied. And because we do not understand what we really need, what the impulse for retribution is really hungering for, we think inflicting even more suffering will do the trick.

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So, is Osama bin Laden in hell? Yes, absolutely. But I will not be at peace, I will not believe that justice has been done, until he is redeemed.

—Eric Reitan, Beyond Retribution: Bin Laden’s Death in its Cosmic Context

via @eatingwords

Thin Places

I know plenty of people who find God most reliably in books, in buildings, and even in other people. I have found God in all of these places too, but the most reliable meeting place for me has always been creation. Since I first became aware of the Divine Presence in that lit-up field in Kansas, I have known where to go when my own flame is guttering. To lie with my back flat on the fragrant ground is to receive a transfusion of the same power that makes the green blade rise. To remember that I am dirt and to dirt I shall return is to be given my life back again, if only for one present moment at a time. Where other people see acreage, timber, soil, and river frontage, I see God’s body, or at least as much of it as I am able to see. In the only wisdom I have at my disposal, the Creator does not live apart from creation but spans and suffuses it. When I take a breath, God’s Holy Spirit enters me. When a cricket speaks to me, I talk back. Like everything else on earth, I am an embodied soul, who leaps to life when I recognize my kin. If this makes me a pagan, than I am a grateful one.

…I learned the proper name for those places on earth where the Presence is so strong that they serve as portals between this world and another. “Thin places,” the Irish call them, which turn out to include not only the famous places such as Croagh Patrick and Glendalough but also the ordinary places that people walk right by if they are not paying attention.

On our first day in Ireland, Ed and I discovered a thin place in a cow pasture. We were not looking for it. We were just taking a walk down a country lane after supper when we saw a break in the hedges off to our left, like a hole in a garden wall. Curious, we followed the well-worn footpath a couple of hundred feet to where it ended at a little mossy hole full of crystal clear water. If not for the tidy bank of stones set into its side, we might have mistaken it for an ordinary watering hole, but someone had clearly taken pains to hallow the place.

“Do you feel that?” Ed said.

“I do,” I said. Freshness was pouring from that spring, drenching me as thoroughly as a shower. I felt as peaceful and alive as I had felt in ages. My jet lag was all gone. How it worked was a complete mystery to me, but there was no denying the effect. Simply to stand near that spring was to experience living water.

Later I would find the Celtic theology that went with the experience, in which God’s “big book” of creation is revered alongside God’s “little book” of sacred scripture. I would also find Christian mystics such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Julian of Norwich, who found heaven on earth in union with the Divine. “I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks,” Bernard wrote in the twelfth century, while Julian recognized the love of God in a hazel nut in her hand. Hildegard of Bingen coined the word viriditas (“green power”) to describe the divine power of creation, while Francis of Assisi composed love songs to Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

“You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins,” wrote the seventeenth-century Anglican priest Thomas Traherne, “till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.” Since I had received Christian education that taught me to view creation as both fallen and inert, I was happy to discover these dissenting opinions, but they only confirmed what I already knew to be true. I did not live on the earth but in it, in communion with all that gave me life.

—Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

Cathedral of Grass and Dirt

As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seems to embrace me a surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors,  and most palpable when I was alone. When I think of my first cathedral, I am back in a field behind my parents’ house in Kansas, with every stalk of prairie grass lit up from within. I can hear the entire community of crows, grasshoppers, and tree frogs who belong to this field with me. The smell of the grass is so sweet that it perfumes me from within, while the sun heating the top of my head brings out my own fragrance too. There is more in this field than I will ever be able to discover—not in the abandoned shells of land snails and the shed feathers of blue jays but also round holes in the earth that might have been dug by field mice or black snakes, but I will never know which, because as long as I lie there watching the hole, no creature ever appears to go in or come out of it.

This does not really matter because lying there is very good. My skin is happy on the black dirt, which speaks  a language my bones understand. If I roll over and think only about the places on my back that are touching the ground, then pretty soon I cannot tell whether I am pressing down on the earth or the earth is pressing up on me….

I am floating in this field, held up towards the sun by the black dirt under my back. I am this earth’s child, and I know it. When I am done lying here, I will visit the small crystal stream that runs through this field to see what is moving in it today. The Presence will be there too, lighting up everything that moves. I have met salamanders there, tadpoles, crayfish, and water bugs. I have watched the moss on the bottom ripple as the water runs over it. Years later, I will discover that this was no crystal stream but a drainage ditch. The difference between these two descriptions of the same place will screw with my sense of reality for a long time. Is the Divine Presence in the world, or in my eye?

—Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

Andy Goldsworthy, Earth Artist

I just saw a marvellous documentary about British earth artist Andy Goldsworthy. He creates sculptures in nature using found natural materials. Some of these are quite ephemeral, such as a lattice of icicles or an arrangement of leaves on the ground, and others are more permanent stone structures, located in the landscape that they are made from. As he describes it, working with natural materials is his way of connecting with the earth and understanding it, and the impermanent nature of many of his sculptures is an integral part of the work.

See more at Cass Sculpture or the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue. There is also a Flickr group devoted Goldsworthy’s art. The beautiful documentary Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time can be seen (in whole or in part, depending on copyright enforcement) on YouTube.